Sunless Sea Review

Troubled is very much the operative word. As I said, Sunless Sea is equally a game about death. A ship Captain has many concerns to which he must attend. Fuel for the engines, supplies for the crew, his own sanity, dastardly pirates, angry giant crabs, living icebergs, and that's just on the ocean. Unseen threats may also lurk at your chosen destination. Make the wrong decision during a story, and it may tip your terror level past the point of no return, or kill all your crew and you along with them.

Although a Captain must go down with his ship, not all of him is lost to the deep. He can leave a legacy to whoever follows in his footsteps, giving them a slightly improved chance of succeeding where he failed. It might be the aid of a specific officer, a better ability to spy enemy vessels, or simply his charts of the waters he already explored. It's a two-steps forward, one step back style of game.

Here's where I am conflicted about whether the course Sunless Sea has chosen is the right one. The combination of a heavy focus on storytelling and a dynamic experience that's different every time is an extremely volatile one liable to blow up in a developer's face. Failbetter do add a couple of stabilising agents. The legacy system is one, while the islands are reshuffled every time you die (unless the legacy your new Captain receive stipulates otherwise).

Theoretically this all works. But in practice considerable chunks of my time with Sunless Sea were spent either bored or frustrated, and I think the problem is one of balancing. First off, although there are countless cruel and unusual fates that may befall a Captain, in the offing the emphasis is overwhelmingly on fuel and supplies. Your ship and its crew burn through both at an incredibly fast rate, and in the early hours money (known in game as "Echoes") is fairly hard to come by. So my enjoyment of Sunless Sea's story and atmosphere was hindered by constantly keeping one eye on my fuel bar and the other on my wallet.

Further to this, although I don't have a problem with a game killing my character in a way that is abrupt or even unfair, I do have a problem with it killing me in a way that is uninteresting, and running out of fuel in your first hour of play is precisely that. It's so easy to do, as well. Getting pulled into a fight can easily eat up a whole barrel of fuel, so you need to ensure that you carry at least half as much more than you think you'll need, otherwise you'll be over the side in a dinghy, and at the mercy of one of Sunless Seas' equally unpalatable contingent plans.

The other major issue with Sunless Sea is immediacy. Other games of this ilk, like Spelunky, Rogue Legacy, and NEO Scavenger, compensate for their harsh mechanics by having a very speedy early game. Even dying in Dark Souls rarely costs more than ten minutes as you return to the boss that squashed you. But Sunless Sea burns its coal at a much slower pace. You're talking at least half an hour, possibly an hour, before you've returned to the point where you're not fretting about bloody fuel. Furthermore, while Sunless Sea reshuffles its islands when you die, the starting islands are fairly standardised, so this early game ends up repetitive anyway.

Push past that achingly slow opening, however, and Sunless Sea reveals its vicious beauty. Its strangely jaunty yet brooding atmosphere, its world honed razor sharp by Fallen London's talented wordsmiths, the countless islands and stories begging to be discovered and explored. Hence my difficulty in recommendation. I am at once enthralled and annoyed. So I will say this. Sunless Sea's ocean is at least worth dipping into. As for booking a month-long cruise, that's a voyage you'll have to make on your own.